A CULTURE MOLDED BY FAMILYPROVES TO BE A WINNER FOR STURGIS MOLDED PRODUCTS

STORY HEATHER BAKER | IMAGE HANNAH ZIEGELER

COMPANYSturgis Molded Products (SMP)

HEADQUARTERS1950 Clark Street
Sturgis, MI 49091

WEBSITE
smpco.com

YEAR FOUNDED
1966

REGIONAL FOOTPRINT182,500 square feet, with a 30,000-square-foot warehouse expansion planned later in 2018

LOCAL EXECUTIVE

Mark D. Weishaar, President

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES
240

ANNUAL SALES$50 million

AN ENTREPRENURUAL SPARK
After working for others during his twenties and thirties, Paul Clark established his own mold-making business at the age of 40. SMP resulted from the Clark family’s vision to establish a culture that is both family-owned and privately-held which it still is today.

MOLDED TO PERFECTION
“We’re a plastics injection molding company. We use the latest technologies in scientific molding to provide solutions for our customers who typically provide us with designs for parts that they want made,” explains Mark Weishaar, president of SMP. “Figuring out how to make traditional metal parts in plastic is our specialty. Our customers will bring us a metal part and our engineers will concept out how to design it in plastic. We’re also now doing two-shot molding, a specialized and automated process where different materials, including two separate kinds of resin, are injected into a single, multi-chambered mold.”

PRODUCT PLACEMENT
“About 80 percent of our business is functional automotive and heavy truck parts—all kind of parts found in a car. You just can’t see them. They’re under everything and involve technical design,” says Weishaar. SMP products are not just under the hood; You can find them under the mascot logo on football helmets. “And then the remaining percentage of our business is for the medical and packaging industries such as dosing devices that come with medicines. We have a clean room where we perform those functions which is one of our advantages.”

JOBS RUN THE GAMUTJobs range from unskilled positions to technical positions like electricians, toolmakers, and automation specialists that require a technical or two-year degree to engineers with four-year degrees.

COMMUNITY ROOTS GROW DEEP
“We have an employee who retired (a couple of months ago) who was here 42 years; his kids worked here in the summers. This is a place where people know there’s going to be stability. They know we’re going to be here for the long haul. We want to be family-owned for the next hundred years,” says Weishaar.

WHAT YOU NEED
“If we say something, we’re going to do it. We focus on quality for our customers. Our engineers develop deep collaborations with technology experts around the world to offer solutions to our customers before we are asked, ‘Hey, I need this product to be made in plastic. Can you do that?’” tells Weishaar.

“The word ‘stewardship’ means a lot to us—stewardship of the environment, stewardship of our people, and stewardship of the assets that we have. Our customers experience an empowered culture as we give people tremendous opportunity to grow and do new things. And we find a way to make our work structure fit that. We give them ‘What You Need,’ That’s our ‘WYN’ culture: W-Y-N or the first letter from each word in ‘What You Need.’”

NOW HIRING
Dedicated people looking for a career in a family-oriented environment can learn more at smpco.com/jobs.aspx or by calling 269.651.9381. Those with tooling, automation, or maintenance skills are most in demand.

Our hope is that the readers of 269 MAGAZINE will become active participants in the world around them and join our mission to make Southwest Michigan the place to make a home, go to work, and bring dreams to reality.